“You Can’t Live Like This”: Cuba Goes Dark for the Third Time in March as Recovery Efforts Begin

MIAMI — The lights went out in Havana again on Saturday night. The third time this month. The second time in five days.

Cuba’s national electric grid collapsed Saturday evening at 6:32 p.m. after a major power plant in Nuevitas, in eastern Cuba’s Camagüey province, failed and went offline. The Cuban Electric Union said the blackout was caused by an unexpected failure of a generating unit at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant. “From that moment, a cascading effect occurred in the machines that were online,” said a report from the Ministry of Energy and Mines, which activated micro-islands of generating units to provide power to vital centers, hospitals, and water systems.

As night fell, Havana’s streets were mostly pitch black, with people navigating using cell phone lights and flashlights, just five days after the previous blackout. In the touristy old city of Havana, some restaurants were able to stay open thanks to generators, with musicians playing music. But the regular blackouts have made life more difficult for Cubans.

The words of ordinary Cubans captured in the hours after the grid failed say more than any official statement. “This is becoming unbearable,” Ofelia Oliva, a 64-year-old Havana resident, told AFP. “It hasn’t even been a week since we experienced a similar situation. It is getting tiresome,” she said as she returned home after giving up on plans to visit her daughter. “I wonder if we are going to be like this our whole lives. You can’t live like this,” Nilo Lopez, a 36-year-old taxi driver, told AFP.

In the interior of the island, daily blackouts exceed 40 hours. Cubans face daily blackouts of up to 15 hours in Havana alone. The blackouts have a significant impact on the population—disrupting work hours, making cooking impossible, and causing food spoilage when refrigerators stop working. In some cases, hospitals have canceled surgeries.

Slow Recovery Underway

As of Sunday morning, authorities had successfully restarted microsystems—isolated power pockets—in western and central regions to provide electricity to hospitals and water pumps. Technical teams aim to unify these two regional grids before attempting to reconnect the eastern provinces to the national system, energy official Lázaro Guerra Hernández said in a television interview.

The restoration process is the same one Cuban engineers performed just days ago after the March 16 blackout—and the repetition itself tells the story. Cuba’s grid is not being fixed. It is being temporarily stabilized between failures.

American University professor William LeoGrande, who has tracked Cuba for decades, was unsparing in his assessment: “The technicians working on the grid are magicians to keep it running at all given the shape that it’s in. If the island drastically reduces consumption and expands renewables, it can struggle along for a while without oil shipments. But it would be constant misery for the general population, and eventually, the economy could collapse completely and then you would have social chaos and probably mass migration.”

The Russian Oil Tankers—and What They Mean

With Cuba in desperate need of fuel, maritime trackers reported this week that two tankers carrying Russian oil and diesel appeared to be on their way to the island—but their status remains unclear. The potential Russian shipment represents Moscow’s most concrete material gesture toward Cuba since the Venezuelan oil lifeline was severed in January—but analysts caution that even if the tankers arrive, two vessels of Russian crude represent days of supply, not a structural solution to the island’s energy dependency.

No oil has been imported to the island since January 9—a period of 72 days that has hit the power sector while also forcing airlines to curtail flights to the island, devastating the all-important tourism sector.

The Nuestra América Convoy—Aid Arrives as the Lights Go Out

The timing of Saturday’s blackout could not have been more viscerally illustrative: it struck on the same day the Nuestra América Convoy’s first delegates were arriving in Havana with 20 tons of humanitarian aid.

The international aid convoy began arriving in Havana this week, bringing medical supplies, food, water, and solar panels to the island. The convoy—organized by Progressive International and supported by left-wing political parties and organizations from 33 countries—represents the most significant international solidarity action directed at Cuba since the current crisis began. Jeremy Corbyn, Pablo Iglesias, and representatives of Mexico’s ruling Morena party were among the 650 delegates who made the journey.

Speaking to convoy delegates on Friday—the day before Saturday’s blackout—Díaz-Canel addressed the international activists directly. He said his government recognizes that “there could be an attack on Cuba” and is preparing accordingly. The statement—delivered to a room of international solidarity activists—carried an implicit message: the convoy’s presence is both a humanitarian act and a political one, signaling to Washington that Cuba is not entirely isolated on the world stage.

The convoy’s solar panels are the most symbolically and practically relevant element of the aid delivery—a technology that does not require oil to generate electricity and that Cuba has been scrambling to deploy across the island as its thermoelectric infrastructure collapses. But as analysts have noted throughout the crisis, 20 tons of solar panels cannot replace the Venezuelan crude that powered Cuba’s grid for two decades.

Washington’s Position—Unchanged

Trump’s statements this week left no ambiguity about Washington’s assessment of Cuba’s trajectory. After Monday’s first blackout, Trump told reporters he believed he would soon have “the honor of taking Cuba”—adding: “Whether I free it, take it—I think I could do anything I want with it, you want to know the truth. They’re a very weakened nation right now.”

The Trump administration is demanding that Cuba release all political prisoners, legalize all political parties and the press, and schedule free multiparty elections as conditions for lifting the embargo.

Additionally, as reported by The New York Times this week, Washington has communicated to Cuban negotiators that Díaz-Canel must personally leave office for any deal to advance.

Senator Marco Rubio—who Trump has tasked with leading the Cuba negotiation—has said the Cuban government’s socialist economic model needs to “change dramatically.” The White House confirmed this week that talks with Cuba are ongoing, describing the regime as a “failing nation.”

What Havana is Saying

Cuba’s diplomatic posture this week has been a careful navigation between confirming talks and drawing hard lines about their limits. Cuba’s deputy chief of mission in Washington, Tanieris Dieguez, told AFP that Havana was open to broad talks with Washington and allowing more investment—but said Cuba’s political system would “never” be part of the negotiations.

Díaz-Canel, for his part, has been simultaneously defiant and pragmatic. He confirmed the talks. He acknowledged the energy crisis in terms more candid than any previous Cuban president. And he warned of “impregnable resistance” against any external aggressor—all within the same week. The day after Trump said he could “do anything he wants” with Cuba, Díaz-Canel warned that “any external aggressor will encounter an unbreakable resistance.”

The Cuban government’s official framing remains consistent: the crisis is caused entirely by the U.S. blockade, the political system is non-negotiable, and Cuba will survive as it has survived every previous attempt to strangle it. Whether a grid that has now collapsed three times in a single month can sustain that narrative through whatever comes next is the question that no official statement can answer.

On the Ground in Havana

Meiven Rodriguez, 40, kept working in a small shop Saturday night, selling cigarettes and using her phone light to count money. “You have to keep going, otherwise you won’t bring money home,” she said. A few fishermen cast for sardines into the dark waters of the oceanfront city.

Tomás David Velázquez Felipe, a 61-year-old Havana resident, said the relentless outages make him think that Cubans who can should just pack up and leave the island. “What little we have to eat spoils,” he said. “Our people are too old to keep suffering.”

Three blackouts in March. Two in five days. A convoy of solidarity delegates sleeping in the dark. Two Russian oil tankers whose arrival is uncertain. A negotiation whose terms both sides describe as non-negotiable. And ten million Cubans are waiting for the lights to come back on.